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Re: Energy

#241

Post by xyzzyz »

jfoutz wrote: post #149
gumby wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the state of the art for energy storage today and basically all the sites are taken. Sure, if energy costs go up a LOT a few more will become viable, but if you look around, for example, Californa, it's hard to find another viable site.

I'd bet you know far more about it than i do. Assuming solar gets super super cheap, well, then we can do a lot. like suffer the losses of long distance transmission lines. Arizona supplying California might be feasible if the solar panels are cheap enough. Parent poster seems to be implying a few bucks a panel, rather than thousands or even hundreds of dollars.

>Arizona supplying California might be feasible if the solar panels are cheap enough.

For 1000 kV AC transmission line from Arizona to California, transmission losses should certainly be smaller than 5%, even less for DC. Arizona is pretty close to California when it comes to electricity transmission.

Re: Energy

#242

Post by legulere »

One problem I see with nuclear power is that it goes the very inefficient way over heat. The prices in the building industry are rising so much that it already is unprofitable to build nuclear power in the west today. (When Hinkley Point C will start producing energy it will have a higher feed in tariff than photovoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)

I don't see any future for nuclear if it doesn't fundamentally change the way it harvests the energy and when it solves the nuclear waste problem economically

Re: Energy

#243

Post by kitd »

slyall wrote: post #153
jfoutz wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than batteries, i think pumping water up a hill will be a lot cheaper. use the water to drive a generator. massive daily over production to fill the nightly (or much longer) reserve.

Pumped storage is hard to scale down and has a fairly fixed loss. There are a bunch of other storage technologies that are at the "almost there" stage though. I personally like the Pumped Heat storage from Isentropic as a possible mainstream contender: http://www.isentropic.co.uk/

That looks really interesting, though I wonder about the energy losses in the pumping mechanism. Are pistons particularly efficient?

As an added bonus, they're based just down the road from me!

Re: Energy

#244

Post by codeshaman »

> A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem.

It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century (coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating philosophical and ethical standards of humanity during the energy boom. Cheap energy + wrong philosophy = bad application of energy = problems enumerated above.

So if you want to tackle any of those problems, you have to work on both variables in that equation, just increasing the availability of energy without raising awareness of how to apply it, will lead to unsatisfactory results in the long term.

Re: Energy

#245

Post by chinathrow »

jddw wrote: post #214
abalone wrote: post #164

> terrestrial-based atomic energy... has major advantages when it comes to cost Are we talking public cost? Because that's all that matters. So far the public cost of nuclear power has been extraordinary, due to accidents and waste. I understand that some of these startups aim to process existing waste in relatively small distributed reactors but what is the public cost of spreading a bunch of "mini" toxic waste site…

First, the reactors are consuming the fuel while deployed, but no waste is stored at the sites. It is stored centrally so there are a few centralized sites that hold the waste for a few hundred years. After which you could make things out of the material and use them around your home without issue. The reactors cannot be deviated for nefarious purposes. And the materials are not less secure. The materials are being c…

All your statements seems to good to be true. Can you back them up with some facts?

Re: Energy

#246

Post by sebastianconcpt »

DennisP wrote: post #128
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if nuclear includes decommissioning and clean-up costs. Do you really want lakes full of residual waste for the next few tens of millennia? The UK currently has no idea what to do with a lot of its waste. So it's simply left to rust and ferment in water - not a good outcome. Sustainable intermittency turns out to be something of a myth anyway. Intermittency effects across Europe turn out to be negligible. So…

Long-term waste isn't a factor for UPower or Helion.

How?

Re: Energy

#247

Post by sebastianconcpt »

codeshaman wrote: post #244

> A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem. It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century (coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating philosophical and ethical st…

Indeed. Technology is a multiplier. If we as humans keep repeating some errors we'll shoot our foot (with bigger guns)

Re: Energy

#248

Post by jeffreyrogers »

rtfeldman wrote: post #203
kolbe wrote: post #177

> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same…

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough. YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

The reason those kinds of comments look ridiculous is because no one bothered to look up the thousands of other comments that people posted about similarly ridiculous sounding things that never panned out.

Re: Energy

#249

Post by DennisP »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #246
DennisP wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-term waste isn't a factor for UPower or Helion.

How?

UPower is a fast reactor. 99% of nuclear waste, and almost all long-term waste, is transuranics, which fast reactors use as fuel. What remains is the fission products, which go back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries. Encase them in glass and bury them, and you're good.

Helion is a fusion reactor. Its "waste" is helium, and it uses a reaction that produces only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation.

In both cases the reactor itself may become somewhat radioactive, but that's another short-term problem.

Re: Energy

#250

Post by tim333 »

chinathrow wrote: post #36
andy_ppp wrote: post #26

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few tho…

Yes, multiple decomissioning projects are showing the true costs these days. Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greifswald_Nuclear_Power_Plant Decomissioned: 1990 Destruction started: 1995 Ongoing as of today....

Yeah, I see from Wikipedia "In France, decommissioning of Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant, a fairly small 70 MW power plant, already cost €480 million (20x the estimate costs) and is still pending after 20 years." Plus it leaked into the lake nearby.
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